Scottish Authors > Fionn Mac Colla Novelist & Historian 1906-1975

Fionn Mac Colla, the pen-name of Thomas Douglas MacDonald, was born in Montrose in 1906 and died in Edinburgh in 1975. On leaving school, he trained as a teacher in Aberdeen and taught briefly in Wester Ross before accepting a lectureship in the Scots College at Safed in Palestine. Returning to Scotland in 1929 with the intention of going to University, he started writing seriously, and his first novel The Albannach was published to critical acclaim in 1932. In 1940 he was appointed to a teaching post in Benbecula, thus beginning a sojourn of over twenty years in the Western Isles, mostly in Barra. He returned latterly to Edinburgh, retiring from teaching in 1967.

Mac Colla saw the Scottish condition mirrored in his own family background, in which his father's Black Isle and Glenmoriston forebears represented the Gaelic element in the equation, and his mother's folk, who came from the Mearns, the Scots element. He joined the National Party of Scotland in 1928, and remained a life-long nationalist. He was born into a Plymouth Brethren family, but rejected that creed as an adult. Later, he and his wife Mary became converts to Roman Catholicism. In politics, religion and life he sought an integration of consciousness which is a Leitmotiv in his writing.

Mac Colla's philosophy as a writer is under-pinned by a knot of ideas and ideals: Scotland's unity as a nation was forged in the Wars of Independence; that unity was challenged by powerful political-economic interests, especially from the sixteenth century onwards; these were permitted to flourish by a negative force which has dogged Scotland since then; the negative force is a function of political emasculation and the workings of Calvinism on the Scottish mind, which has to be confronted before Scotland can be a wholesome place.

In The Albannach the Highlands are the backdrop for the story of Murdo Anderson, who experiences the spiritual, social and economic constraints of contemporary Scotland, before finding a sort of salvation through returning to his home village and rekindling community spirit and local tradition there. In And the cock crew (1945) Mac Colla took the "story" back a stage, to the time of the Highland Clearances, where again the opposition between the teaching of the Presbyterian Church and the spirit of the community is an important axis. Although he did not complete the major novel he planned for the Reformation period, two chapters appeared separately - as Scottish Noel and Ane Tryall of heretiks. Like all his historical writing, they show tremendous assurance in handling the past, both in historical accuracy and in realism. He is a highly accomplished writer whose representations of dialogue show a great sensitivity to linguistic variation past and present, while his descriptive passages are equally well executed.

Fionn Mac Colla's literary output was relatively small, but he is a major figure of the Scottish Renaissance. Many of his ideas about Scotland, Scottish history and Scottish writing have been echoed by subsequent writers with a variety of political outlooks but it required a special courage and obduracy to articulate them in the years before the decline of Empire and the Church.

William Gillies

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